Notes and Editorial Reviews

Sinopoli's response to the Stabat Mater is operatic, taking account of one of the composers Dvorák most admired, Verdi.

Telarc issued the Stabat mater as a tribute to the memory of Robert Shaw, directing a fine performance of a work he said he regretted not having come to know earlier in his life. Now, sadly, it is Giuseppe Sinopoli who is commemorated, in a performance of very different character recorded live in Dresden in April 2000, a year before his own death.

Sinopoli was famously a controversial conductor, at his finest an inspiring and original one. Where Shaw is, as might be expected, in his element with the Atlanta Symphony Chorus and Orchestra in giving a performance acknowledging theRead more Oratorio nature and the symphonic background to the music, Sinopoli takes a different approach. He too produces fine orchestral playing from a fine orchestra, but his response to the work is more operatic - or to be more precise, it takes account of one of the composers Dvorák most admired, Verdi. There is colour and dramatic verve in his handling of the score, one that carries players and chorus and the excellent solo quartet with him, in the powerful scene-setting of the opening four-verse section but also in the more intimate single-verse setting of the 'Virgo virginum praeclara'. One of the difficulties confronting Dvorák was introducing sufficient variety into a poem of steady mourning, and to achieve this over the course of almost an hour and a half was a triumph of imagination and of compositional craft. Sinopoli's variety and control of tempo yield nothing to Shaw's in responding to the work's structure, and are no less eloquent in expressing how much the text meant to the pious Catholic Dvorák (Hartmut Fladt's note quotes the story of him leaving a meeting with Brahms, astonished that a man who impressed him so much could believe in nothing).

-- John Warrack, Gramophone [8/2001]

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...a rather sublime recording made in Dresden with the late Giuseppe Sinopoli.

-- MusicWeb International [4/2002]

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It is a shame that Dvorák’s sacred music has never approached the popularity of his more famous symphonies, or his opera Rusalka... His Stabat Mater does get an airing occasionally (and there is a lovely recording by Sinopoli on DG 471 033-2)...

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